That Mystic EP

Night Slugs;
2010

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Dance music in 2010 does a lot of things very well: paranoid dubstep throb, blissed-out space-disco thump, idiosyncratic bedroom-producer clippety-clop. But I'm not hearing a whole lot of chaos-- the sense of apocalyptic noise-riffs exploding, of producers layering as many weird elements as they could manage on top of each other. That's what used to keep me up listening to the one weekly techno radio show on my crappy clock radio, ear up to the speaker, getting my mind blown by stuff like the Prodigy's "Charly" or L.A. Style's "James Brown Is Dead". These days, nobody really gives me that feeling like the Brooklyn producer Kingdom.

Kingdom made his first real dent earlier this year with "Mind Reader", a gleefully frantic pileup of house-diva wails and euphoric bass-farts. Next to that, the new EP That Mystic feels restrained to the point of austerity. But there's still a ton of shit happening here. Kingdom maintains the same sort of head-rush intensity of early-90s rave producers-- so many different percussive synth riffs beeping their way onto the track and than bouncing all around the interior like ping-pong balls. But as many new elements as Kingdom introduces, he keeps everything working in service of the basic, central pulse at the heart of every song.

That's especially true on the opening title track, which sets the blueprint while the other tracks just get busy within that foundation. But even as one track, "Pang", almost works as an experiment in straight-up dubstep, there's still a cluttered sort of simplicity at work here. All those bleeps and dings and whirs are there for a reason, and they all serve the tracks' central propulsion. This is fun music, and it doesn't have any big aim beyond that.

One neat wrinkle on this EP: Kingdom has a habit of sampling kinda-big R&B hits like Cassie's "Me & U" and Beyoncé's "Sweet Dreams", taking ghostly snatches of those familiar vocals and letting them flit around in the background, dodging in and out of the beats. Those songs are new enough that they still exist somewhere within memory, but old enough that it takes a second to dredge up where that little slice of vocal comes from. They sound like just-out-of-reach memories. But Kingdom never builds his tracks around those samples, and he rarely introduces them in the first half of the track. They're just one more weapon in the arsenal-- and that arsenal's getting bigger all the time.